“What’s the job?”
“Pushing hamburgers in this fast-food joint. They got slots in the lobby, and people play them and eat hamburgers all night long, can you believe it? The last thing you have to do when your shift is over is to wipe off all the handles of the slot machines. They get all covered with mustard and mayo and catsup. And you should see the people here. All of them are fat. They’ve either got tans or burns. And if they don’t want to fuck you, you’re just part of the furniture. I’ve had offers from both sexes. Thank God my roomie’s about as sex-oriented as a juniper bush, I… oh, Christ, why am I telling you all this? I don’t even know why I called you. I’m going to hitch out of here at the end of the week, when I get paid.”
He heard himself say: “Give it a month.”
“Don’t go chickenshit. If you leave now you’ll always wonder what you went out there for.”
“Did you play football in high school? I bet you did.”
“I wasn’t even the waterboy.”
“Then you don’t know anything, do you?”
“I’m thinking about killing myself.”
“You don’t even… what did you say?”
“I’m thinking about killing myself.” He said it calmly. He was no longer thinking about long distance and the people who might monitor long distance just for the fun of it-Ma Bell, the White House, the CIA, the Effa Bee Eye. “I keep trying things and they keep not working. It’s because I’m a little too old for them to work, I think. Something went wrong a few years ago and I knew it was a bad thing but I didn’t know it was bad for me. I thought it just happened and then I was going to get over it. But things keep falling down inside me. I’m sick with it. I keep doing things.”
“Have you got cancer?” she whispered.
“I think I do.”
“You ought to go to a hospital, get-”
“It’s soul cancer.”
“You’re ego-tripping, man.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. One way or the other, things are set and they’ll turn out the way they will. Only one thing that bothers me, and that’s a feeling I get from time to time that I’m a character in some bad writer’s book and he’s already decided how things are going to turn out and why. It’s easier to see things that way, even, than to blame it on God-what did He ever do for me, one way or the other? No, it’s this bad writer, it’s his fault. He cut my son down by writing in a brain tumor. That was chapter one. Suicide or no suicide, that comes just before the epilogue. It’s a stupid story.”
“Listen,” she said, troubled, “if they have one of those Dial Help outfits in your town, maybe you ought to…”
“They couldn’t do anything for me,” he said, “and it doesn’t matter. I want to help you. For Christsake look around out there before you go chickenshit. Get off dope, you said you were going to. The next time you look around you’ll be forty and your options will mostly be gone.”
“No, I can’t take this. Some other place-”
“All places are the same unless your mind changes. There’s no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit. I know that. Newspaper headlines, even the signs I see, they all say yeah, that’s right, Georgie, pull the plug. This eats the bird.”
“Listen-”
“No, no, you listen. Dig your ears out. Getting old is like driving through snow that just gets deeper and deeper. When you finally get in over your hubcaps, you just spin and spin. That’s life. There are no plows to come and dig you out. Your ship isn’t going to come in, girl. There are no boats for nobody. You’re never going to win a contest. There’s no camera following you and people watching you straggle. This is it. All of it. Everything.”
“You don’t know what it’s like here!” she cried.
“No, but I know what it’s like here.”
“You’re not in charge of my life.”
“I’m going to send you five hundred dollars-Olivia Brenner, c/o General Delivery, Las Vegas.”
“I won’t be here. They’ll send it back.”
“They won’t. Because I’m not going to put on a return address.”
“Throw it away, then.”
“Use it to get a better job.”
“No.”
“Then use it for toilet paper,” he said shortly, and hung up. His hands were shaking.
The phone tang five minutes later. The operator said: “Will you accept-”
“No,” he said, and hung up.
The phone rang twice more that day, but it was not Olivia either time.
Around two in the afternoon Mary called him from Bob and Janet Preston’s house-Bob and Janet, who always reminded him, like it or not, of Barney and Wilma Flintstone. How was he? Good. A lie. What was he doing for Christmas dinner? Going out to Old Customhouse tonight for turkey with all the trimmings. A lie. Would he like to come over here instead? Janet had all kinds of leftovers and would be happy to get rid of some. No, he really wasn’t very hungry at the minute. The truth. He was pretty well looped, and on the spur of the moment he told her he would come to Walter’s party. She sounded pleased. Did he know it was BYOB? When did Wally Hammer have a party that wasn’t? he asked, and she laughed. They hung up and he went back to sit in front of the TV with a drink.
The phone rang again around seven-thirty, and by that time he was nothing as polite as looped-he was pissy-assed drunk.
“Lo?”
“Dawes?”
“Dozz here; whozzere?”
“Magliore, Dawes. Sal Magliore.”
He blinked and peered into his glass. He looked at the Zenith color TV, where he had been watching a movie called Home for the Holidays. It was about a family that had gathered at their dying patriarch’s house on Christmas Eve and somebody was murdering them one by one. Very Christmasy.
“Mr. Magliore,” he said, pronouncing carefully. “Merry Christmas, sir! And the best of everything in the new year!”
“Oh, if you only knew how I dread ’74,” Magliore said dolefully. “That’s the year the oil barons are going to take over the country, Dawes. You see if they don’t. Look at my sales sheet for December if you don’t believe me. I sold a 1971 Chevy Impala the other day, this car is clean as a whistle, and I sold it for a thousand bucks. A thousand bucks! Do you believe that? A forty-five percent knockdown in one year. But I can sell all the ’71 Vegas I can get my hands on for fifteen, sixteen hundred bucks. And what are they, I ask you?”
“Little cars?” he asked cautiously.
“They’re fucking Maxwell House coffee cans, that’s what they are!” Magliore shouted. “Saltine boxes on wheels! Every time you look at the goddam things cross-eyed and say booga-booga at them the engine’s outta tune or the exhaust system drops off or the steering linkage is gone. Pintos, Vegas, Gremlins, they’re all the same, little suicide boxes. So I’m selling those as fast as I can get them and I can’t move a nice Chevy Impala unless I fuckin' give it away. And you say happy new year. Jesus! Mary! Joseph the carpenter!”
“That’s seasonal,” he said.
“I didn’t call about that anyway,” Magliore answered. “I called to say congratulations.”
“Congratuwhatchens?” He was honestly bewildered.
“You know. Crackle-crackle boom-boom.”
“Oh, you mean-”
“Sssst. Not on the phone. Be cool, Dawes.”
“Sure. Crackle-crackle boom-boom. That’s good.” He cackled.
“It was you, wasn’t it, Dawes?”
“To you I wouldn’t admit my middle name.”
Magliore roared. “That’s good. You’re good, Dawes. You’re a fruitcake, but you’re a clever fruitcake. I admire that.”
“Thanks,” he said, and cleverly knocked back the rest of his drink.
“I also wanted to tell you that everything was going ahead on schedule down there. Rumble and roar.”